Big Japan: 12th July 2009

I watched the tag league final from the May show, but decided as it was a one match show not to post a review. The final itself was a less good version of the group match, and I have to question the necessity of booking a thirty minute draw and a six minute overtime - as a result, it was necessarily overdone. The nearfalls in the last few minutes were just too much. Also, the problem with Isami and Takeda taking that much punishment, then turning the match around in a few minutes is it really lack credibility. That said, for all the structural defects, its hard to fault the effort, and the level of carnage, and at least, for the most part, the nearfalls were partner assisted, which is better than continual kickouts.

To this show - I appear not to have the June card. The Isami vs. Sasaki ladder death match was simple and effective. I like Sasaki against the younger guys - he maintains a kind of barely restrained contempt for them. Crazy spot of the match was the fishermans neckbreaker rights on the ladder, but ladder assisted violence was plentiful here, and I liked a couple of other features - the leg work, while it lasted, was kind of novel, and I liked the finish (or more specifically, I liked how, in the aftermath of Sasaki kicking a ladder into Isami's head, he rolled around liked he'd just kicked a ladder).

I also found myself enjoying the Dradition six man with Fujinami, Sekimoto and Okabayashi on one side, and Saito, Sasaki and Shinya Ishikawa on the other side. It felt like the prescence of older guys forced the younger guys to drop endless strike exchanges and no-selling, and actually wrestle - there's plenty of decent mat work to start, they use a lot more submissions, and the power moves are minimised, making those that are used seem that much more impactful. The match is built around the two older guys and the two higher ranked heavyweights alternating control of the match, at the expense of the two rookies. Ishikawa is good for bumping and selling - a little too textbook, perhaps, the sort of bumping that can remind you its a bump rather than make the other guys offence look nasty, but you can tell he's trying. The old guys were fun, and I wish they'd always stick around.

The title match is difficult. If you are going to do over-the-top spotfest, that's fine - I can enjoy that, and am not going to get all serious about a match that clearly isnt. It's why I like Abby Jr matches. There were elements of that here - spots where they challenge each other to climb the scaffold just to hit each other with tubes and do a highspot don't make you think of anything other than a (quite violent) exhibition. But then the middle of this felt much more like an actual competetive war, for all the violence, I felt like they were selling the buildup of the damage. In fact, I was with it until the completely unnecessary ending sequence. A Yankee Driver off a scaffold should finish a match. If you want to do more stuff, do it beforehand. My basic defence of deathmatches to non-fans is that when done well, they conform to a basic story common to most wrestling - that opponents are fighting towards what they consider a match-winner, be it an established finisher, a submission hold on a weakened limb, or anything else which the story of the match dictates. In this environment, the scaffold if the match winner (just as the lighttubes equate to your basic strikes in a non-deathmatch environment). I would have just accepted a kickout of the driver off the top, followed with the moosault off the top, with Takeda barely moving . The run of moves between those two points though are the sort of mindless nonsense I'd expect from guys like Kasai and Numazawa.

Maybe that's the reason for the frustration. In a promotion like BattlArts, the best the young guys can do is match up with the older generation who, to my eyes at least, regularly turn out great examples of their style. In Big Japan, the new generation has a chance to take the deathmatch style beyond where it stagnated with the older generation by 2008. We saw in the tag league the three top young guys, guided by Sasaki, deliver the same level of violence of a Kasai, but combined with better selling, better execution of transition moves, better brawling, and most importantly, more dramatic and exciting stories in the ring. The 2007 Sasaki-Miyamoto title match really set out a template for that, but its taken a while to find more than two guys able to consistently deliver this. This title match, ultimately, felt like a massive step back from this.